Njabulo S.

Ndebele & Interview

Antjie Krog
Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele published the A case for sheer compulsive and
essay collections Fine Lines from the Box: Fur-
ther Thoughts About Our Country (2007) and
imaginative depth
Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South
African Literature and Culture (1991),
the novella The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)
and the award-winning Fools and Other
Stories (1984).
Antjie Krog is an award-winning poet,
translator and writer of nonfiction, as well
as Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the
University of the Western Cape. Email:
akrog@uwc.ac.za

Professor Ndebele, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Could you please comment on
Mofolos style at the hand of this paragraph about the Deep Pool?

Chaka o itlhatsoitse, eare ha a le lekhatheng la ho qeta, tlopo ea hae ea thoenya-thoenya,

ea fere-ferella, letlalo la hloho le tlasa eona la futhumala, la tsapola kapele-pele, ha ba
ha phakisa ha khutsa, ha re tu. E ne e sa le hosasa-sasa, pele-pele ho letsatsi; me o ne
a tolla bobeng, moo ho tabehang haholo. Ka holimo ho moo a leng teng e le phororo
e kholo, me tlasa phororo eo, hona moo a leng teng, e le koeetsa ea tonana, thapolla
e tabehang, e tala-tala, e tebang haholo. Koeetseng eo metsi a le matoana-toana a
re to! (Chaka 23)

Chaka washed himself. It happened that, as he was about to finish, the tuft of hair
on his head shivered and shook, and the skin under it felt warm and it rippled very
quickly; and just as suddenly as it began, everything was quiet again, dead still. It was
very early in the morning, long, long before the sun was due, and he was bathing in
an ugly place, where it was most fearsome. High up from the place where he stood
was a tremendous waterfall, and at the bottom of that waterfall, right by him, was an
enormous pool, a frightening stretch of water, dark green in colour and very deep. In
this pool the water was pitch dark, intensely black. (Chaka trans. Kunene 21)

The effect of the repetition matoana-toana a re to! Ah! This is beautiful. It sounds
delightfully beautifully writtenits effect is emphaticaltala means green, tala-
tala means it is green, deep green, real green, truest green. Matoana-toana, from
the stem nto, means dark, very dark water, with implications of endless depths.
Ka pele-pele, fast-fast, quick. This pool, the moment he describes this, Mofolo in-

98 TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tvl.v.53i2.7 ISSN: 0041-476X E-ISSN: 2309-9070
tensifies the setting, livens up its dimensions. And this is even before the King of
the Deep appears. So the setting for something majestic to appear is created and
mainly by the style.1 Though repetition is a feature of Sesotho, Mofolo applies it
in an unusual wayso as to find the words real and deepest meaning, as if the
meaning is hidden within itself. Also the vocabularythe water, the surround-
ings of the water, the vastness, the unknownness. And already the movement on
the water suggests something enormous appearing, coming from the uncharted
depths. And then somewhere among all of this vastness of nature is the boy
Chaka, innocently washing himself, his mother hiding, his sudden awareness
that something is beginning to happen and then his small hand moving to hold
on to a little tuft of his hair.

What about the word ugly as a description of the pool?

I would say bobeng is used here more in the sense of not ugliness, but danger.
Danger of depth, a dangerous setting. Bobeng as ugly is perhaps too literal for my
taste, because bobe is indeed ugliness, but it is not the ugliness of something as a value
judgement. My sense of it is danger. I think bobeng haholo means an unfathomable
danger rather than a judgement about the appearance of the place.

Can you comment on the style of the following extract?

Chaka, mohla a tlohang hae ha a baleha, o tlohile e le Chaka, e le motho ea joale ka

batho bohle, ea nang le mefokolo ea botho; kajeno o khutla a fetohile hampe; ho khutla
nama feela, bokantle, ha e le boeena bo setse moo a tsoang teng; o khutla ka moea
osele le ka botho bosele. (51)

Chaka, the day he left home in flight, he left as Chaka, a human being like all other
human beings who had human failings. Today he comes back greatly changed; it is only
his flesh that is coming back, only his outer self; as for his true self, that has remained
at the place from which he is returning; he comes back with a completely different
spirit and a different personality. (47)

This is spectacularly phrased with an impressive psychological insight. And again

the repetition! He meets Isanusi and the core of his being dies. He left as Chaka,
but then only his flesh comes back; only his outer self; his true self has departed.
But see how Mofolo insists that his descent was not from the position of a perfect
beinghe is someone who has failures. And then the loosening begins. I agree with
Kunene that his meeting with Isanusi is the critical point in the novel, from a plot
point of view: a choice-making moment. As a novelist he knows this choice leads

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016 99

to its consequences. Chaka chooses to kill. And the fact of wanting more and more
and more power is a factor of the consequences of the choice in which youve given
everything of yourself to that choice. You were lured into that, lured is the word,
he was pulled into that choice and sank into its depths. As a consequence he lost all
the other facets of himself. The novel explores the implications of total choice and
being lured into the benefits of that choice along the way until it burns you out. It
may have something to do with Christianitythat is one interpretation. There may
be others. In my view, Mofolo contemplates the human condition. Where are we
today? What choices do we make in 2015? I see a lot of people who have followed
the path of being lured and keep going along the path of unpalatable choices.

When did you first come across Mofolos work?

I read the book, the Dutton translation, in my undergraduate days. I bumped

into one day while browsing through the university library (which was later to be
named Thomas Mofolo University Library) at the Roma campus of the University
of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland (UBLS).2 I had then also just read Christopher
Marlowes Doctor Faustus which was prescribed for us. So when I read the Dutton
translation of Mofolos Chakaabout the circumstances of Chakas birth, his difficult
upbringing, his subsequent, all-consuming vengeance, accentuated by his meeting
with Isanusi and his choice of a life of killing, which reached its highest destruc-
tive power after he seems to lose his mind after the death of his mother NandiI
recognized the resonances with the tragedy of Faustus who gains all the power in
the world, but loses his soul, considered to be the most precious attribute of human
life. What I found to my pleasure in the Dutton translation were imaginative, artistic
resonances with Marlowes Dr Faustus. But Mofolos artistic devices were more fa-
miliar in an affirming kind of way. Even as a township boy in Charterston Location,
Nigel, I came across numerous, frightening stories of a gigantic snake that lived in
the bottomless depths of rivers or lakes; of how sometimes it came out as a tornado
to wreak havoc; how it needed to be appeased through customary rituals. In this
way, the mythical elements in Marlowes drama stood in a relationship of compara-
tive, if mutual, imaginative reinforcement with Mofolos fiction. It seemed to me
that Mofolos artistic achievement scaled the same heights as Shakespeares. Later
when I read Dostoyevsky, Homer, even the epics such as Sundiata, I would feel the
same about Mofolos achievement in Chaka. It made me feel culturally grounded in
my own universe as an African in ways I never experienced before. Against Africas
colonial history, here was a work that resonated with and even artistically overshad-
owed a western text (Doctor Faustus) and scaled the same heights as some of those
considered among the worlds best.

100 TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016

Can you expand a little on what you mean by overshadowed? And what question is Mofolo
asking?

The imaginative depth in the exploration of a descent into hell, a moral hell. I think
Chaka went further than Marlowe in depicting that descent. I dont even know
whether Mofolo is asking a question. I think he was a writer who was fascinated by
a drama that he captured partly through his research. He travelled and did research
and then gave it an artistic and aesthetic expression where you, the reader, have to
find resonances within it that make sense to you. I never got the sense that Mofolo
was preaching about bad traditional customs or evil in the Christian senseI never
got that. Its like Moby Dickthe novel about the whalethe supernatural element
simply deepens the profoundness of the falling. My familiarity with the culture in
the text made the universal theme resonate within me more profoundly.
Sometime after reading Chaka, I bumped into a copy of a French play also called
Chaka in the same Lesotho University library, written by a French speaking African dra-
matist, and it gave me a sense of just how much the book moved across the continent.3
I like to believe that what I found is probably what Senghor and Csaire found: here
was something grounded in our myths, universal and authentically ours. I remember
wanting to do a biography on Mofolo once, but in the end never got round to it.

There have been sentiments expressed, even at our conference, that Mofolo was deliberately
anti-Zulu. Would you agree?

No, I would disagree fiercely! Certain depictions of human reality are not logically
judgemental, but they can be morally so. In other words a real person is being looked
at, but from the point of view, not of condemnation, but of what lessons about the
human condition they offer to you. I like to think that some of the criticism about an
anti-Nguni perspective is driven from a Zulu nationalistic sentiment that is embar-
rassed by a morally unflattering artistic depiction of a historical figure idealised by
nationalistic sentiment. A similar observation can be made about Christian readings
of Mofolos Chaka. For me Mofolos Chaka is not necessarily value laden with Christian
readings of Chakas descent into hell (although such a reading is most probable). It
is really that in my view, Mofolos rendering of Chaka leaps away from simple moral
judgement towards a profound contemplation of good and evil with an imaginative
force that puts him in a category of few writers in the world.

His using Shaka is like your using Winnie Mandela?4

Thats right. The conundrum of being human! There are situations in which you may
draw moral and ethical judgement. But in the end, what Mofolo does through the power

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016 101

of his imagination is to expose us to human experience that is as powerful and as mys-
terious as the force of gravity, the flashes of lightning that make you ponder existence
deeply.5 You keep going back to itawed by the complexity of the human being. It is
true, you might garner some lessons. But the total aesthetic experience might push you
beyond the utilities of lessons towards an affirming sense of being present in the world
while being vulnerable to never knowing entirely, yet sensing the possibility of that
knowledge without ever getting to it. This is where reading Chaka always take me to.

Is it more an honouring?

No, plumbing the depths, is more like it. The word honouring may already be a
judgement which is not necessarily intended by the author. You may take a position
from the perspective of which your own view has to be understood. By the same
token, what you see as honouring, another might see as condemnation. I would
rather say that Mofolo was fascinated by the story of a king who was born under
problematic circumstances. In this connection there are many stories in the litsomo
of badly treated orphans, born out of wedlock, countless stories, reminding me also
of Cinderella in the Western tradition. All cultures have it: what do you do with the
person who grows up under alienating circumstances where the person is disliked, is
not wanted? He grows up to avenge his ill treatment, but crosses the critical bound-
ary of balance. It destroys him as much as it destroys others.
Mofolo heard about Chaka, and as a writer must have been fascinated by the
rising from circumstances of deprivation, hate, loneliness.6 In a sense from a story-
telling trajectory, there is also the element of prediction in stories, of prohibition. A
character is warned not to do something. Consequences of ignoring the warning
are seldom spelt out. Almost invariably, the character ignores the prohibition, and
adverse consequences follow. Chaka is given a choice between medicine that heals
and one which kills. He chooses the latter: the path of vengeance. He chooses the
path of unbridled power and its capacity to destroy. It destroys him too. The moth
flies into the attractive flame and is consumed. In similar fashion, Macbeth is driven
by ambition and the quest for power, and is consumed by his deed of murder.
There is another example, Raskolnikov in Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment:
I can kill an old woman, she is nothing, but then that old woman looms large in his
imagination, comes back to haunt him. All these charactersChaka, Macbeth, Ras-
kolnikovbecome consumed by their murderous acts. There are all these examples
so that actually when I am a Zulu (remember I am also a Mosotho because I spent so
much time in Lesotho) I think Zulus would read a translation of Chaka in Zulu and say:
Wow, it is beautiful! That this great king of ours was interpreted in this waythrough
a story! What we have is a tragedy in the most classical sense. A great person who
gets lost in his own greatness and then dies in the end and everything just falls apart.

102 TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016

Like the works of Shakespeare about the British kings?

Its the way of life. You put away the nationalistic sentiment about being Zulu and
thinking this is my king, and you respond to the resonances of the story with such
power, which tells you more, not about your king but about yourself, the human
condition. This is what I lived with from the time I have read it. You know, really, if
Mofolos intention was to write a story in order to propagate ethnic and Christian
ideological sentiments, one has to admit: then the story brilliantly defeated him! The
story went on its own. The story perhaps set him free.

Acknowledgement
We acknowledge Chris Duntons input in the preparation and recording of this interview.

Notes
1. For a comprehensive analysis of Mofolos style, especially the vivid role of various kinds of repetition,
see Daniel P. Kunene (198231).
2. Ndebele refers to the literary genius of Mofolo in Fine Lines from the Box (32), and mentions in The
Rediscovery of the Ordinary that he thinks of Mofolo and writers such as Jordan, Mhpahlele, Dikobe,
etc. as philosophers, asking ultimate questions about life, moral values and social being (Ndebele
26).
3. Probably Seydou Badian Koyats La mort de Chaka (1961).
4. It is interesting to note that Ndebele, in a strange coincidence, had to deal with the same kinds of
questions in terms of style and the use of a real person in The Cry of Winnnie Mandela. Publishers
in the USA wanted to publish the manuscript, but could not work out under what genre it should
be classified for selling purposes. In his foreword to the new edition he says: I had not written a
biography. It was a fictional interpretation of a life, not the life itself. [] [I]t was important for me to
retain the speculative value of the narrative without any part of it claiming accreditation external to
the narrative, thus curtailing its imaginative freedom (xxix). He adds: The challenge of art in such
circumstances is to search for the formulations of myth, and to pose dilemma, in laying out the dif-
ficult human choices in the public domain; to sensitise that domain by exposing the moral choices to
be made or avoided and to ponder the consequences of those choices (xxxvii). Ndebele regards the
transgressions of borders between literary genres [] [as] analogous to transgressions of borders
between races, ethnicities social classes and geographical spaces. He believes that these transgres-
sions may prompt new ways of experiencing community (xxiiixxiv).
5. In the foreword Ndebele explains how he wrestled in finding ways to keep an effective distance
from the living persona of his protagonist in order to effectively imagine her: My decision not to
interview Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a first-order distancing effect. It underscored my project
as fundamentally artistic, not biographical. It assured me total control over my creative space. It
was a necessity that demanded that I impose vigilance over myself [] the public domain was the
source of all the information I needed (xiii). At the launch of Ndebeles book the evening at Exclusive
Books, somebody called him with the words: Mummy is here suggesting Winnie Mandela herself
arrived unexpectedly. Ndebele writes: By allowing myself to be swept into the usage of the word
Mummy [] I would unwittingly confirm my membership of a community in which that name
resonated with a great deal of shared knowledge, expectations and conduct. [] There was a kind
of social knowledge, and the behaviour it engendered, in which admiration for a public figure easily
turned into adoration, and such adoration became a soft mechanism by which those caught in the
momentum of adoration were enticed into a trap [] in that way humans often worshipped another
of their kind. In that way humans created in others their own domineering monsters [] people then
get caught in a culture of unthinking. They yield to the perceived rewards of membership (xi). He
concludes, If she was Mummy to him (the messenger), she was Winnie Mandela to me (xii).
6. In the introduction to the new edition, Ndebele describes how he was listening to an SABC broadcast
at a party in Lesotho in which respectable leaders of the Mass Democartic Movement (MDM) were

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016 103

 publically condemning and distancing themselves from the actions of Winnie Mandela and her infa-
mous Mandela Football Club. [A]s the broadcast sunk in and was absorbed by the party-goers and
I, I remember feeling angry: how could they do this to her? I remember my intuitions stretching out
across the distances to wherever she was, sensing the unfathomable loneliness of Winnie Mandela
(xx).

Works Cited
Kunene, Daniel P. Thomas Mofolo and the Emergence of Written Sesotho Prose. Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1989.
Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka (Lesotho orthography). Morija: Morija Sesuto Book Depot, 2003 [1926].
_____. Chaka. Trans. Daniel P. Kunene. Essex: Heinemann, 1981.
Ndebele, Njabulo. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Pietermaritz-
burg: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2006.
_____. Fine Lines from the Box: Further Thoughts about Our Country. Johannesburg: Umuzi/Random House,
2007.
_____. The Cry of Winnie Mandela. Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2013 [2003].

104 TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE 53 (2) 2016